


miles we'll wander

by meritmut



Series: and after us, the flood [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Prophetic Dreams, Running Away, Step one: talk to each other without crying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-06 23:49:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17354984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: “I saw—a place,” she says, hesitates, forges ahead: “a planet. We were there. Both of us. I think—I think the Force was telling us to go there.”Her eyes are full of the stubborn faith that’s becoming so familiar to Ben: it draws him in.“I saw it too,” he breathes.





	miles we'll wander

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spookykingdomstarlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/gifts).



> title from 'the code' by casualties of cool
> 
> kisses to amy and larissa

**

The water is cool around his ankles. Ben takes another step, then another, pushing further into the pool until the water reaches his calves; goosebumps break out across his skin and it is up to his knees, now, he is shivering but still he keeps going. There’s something down there, in the pool’s inky depths, and he does not know what it is but it calls him forward, beckoning him deeper and deeper until the water is lapping at his hips and his body is half-numb with the chill spreading through him. It burns like fire across his skin: it seizes his chest in a vicelike grip until even breathing is an effort.

Something colder than ice trickles onto the back of his neck. It splashes across his face when he tips his head back, dripping onto his mouth and tongue. Curiously Ben laps at it, unsure what to expect—water? The iron-and-salt tang of ichor? But he tastes nothing. He smells nothing, and the fingers he brings up to rub his cheek come away stained black as sable; black as a starless night, black as blood under the moon.

When he lifts his hands and lets the rain pour into his cupped palms it pools there with barely a ripple. Not even the faint milky light filtering down from above gets out, once it falls in, only the faraway glimmer of myriad stars; the night sky held in his hands.

The trickle becomes a flood and now it stains the water around him, the blackness spreading as Ben forces himself further into the pool: he is chest-high now in void and he can hear them, the whispers, something waiting for him beneath the surface if he can only reach it. He takes a deep breath, dragging one last gasp of air into his burning lungs as the cold slides between his ribcage like a knife.

The waters close over his head, and then there’s nothing.

 

**

 

The rocking of the ship tips Ben sideways when they exit hyperspace, one hand splaying against the wall to keep his balance as he rises from the bunk. His head swims: he had slept, but not for long, and his dreams had been riven by strange and haunting visions.

He thinks he heard someone calling, that the sound of his name was what roused him in the end, and on the edge of sleep he had followed the voice through an ever-unfolding maze, but awake the doubt sets in. There’s only one other person aboard the shuttle and Ben _knows_ how his name sounds on her lips, whether spoken in a murmur or a cry: he knows, and it hadn’t been her.

She, Rey, is a focused force when he enters the cockpit, preoccupied with guiding them through the star-strewn darkness of realspace. Her hands move as in a dream over the console: she stares out into the void with glassy eyes.

From over her shoulder, Ben frowns down at the chrono on the dash.

“We can’t be at Wroona yet?”

Rey shakes her head. “We’re in the Kira Sector. I pulled us out at the Pax junction.”

“Why?”

“I...” Casting her eyes down, she gnaws on her lip. “I had a dream.”

Inside him, a strange storm of relief and excitement begins to bubble up. Ben lowers himself into the copilot’s chair beside her so he can see her face when he asks, “what kind of dream?”

He can’t keep the urgency from his voice. Rey glances up at him, her brow furrowed. “I saw—a place,” she says, hesitates, forges ahead: “a planet. We were there. Both of us. I think—I think the Force was telling us to go there.”

Her eyes are full of the stubborn faith that’s becoming so familiar to Ben: it draws him in.

“I saw it too,” he breathes.

Rey’s features slacken with relief: some of the tension in her shoulders sloughs away and she turns back toward the dashboard, her fingers flying over the console.

“I looked it up,” she explains. “The planet. I don’t know how but I knew its name—I knew what to look for, like it had been in my head all along.” Her darting hands call up a file from the ship’s computers; the image of a pale spheroid hovering in empty space.

“There it is,” she says softly, her eyes luminous in the projection’s glow.

Ben swallows. Nods once. He has never seen this world, had never heard of it till now, and yet somehow, impossibly, he knows its name.

“Lessa.”

A small world in the Gradilis Sector of Wild Space, insignificant but for its history as a Rakatan outpost in the empire’s glory days. There is no reason it should call to the two of them—no reason it should sing across the stars, whispering its name into their dreams from more than half a galaxy away.

The mystery has its hooks in him.

“It’s far away,” Rey says. “More than a thousand parsecs from any hyperlane. It’ll take a while to get to.”

Ben blinks. “You want—?”

“To go there?” Her eyes flit up to his and suddenly she looks uncertain. “I...I don’t know. But it’s calling us, and—well, where else are we going to go?”

It makes sense, put like that.

There had been no destination in their minds when they left the fleet. No home to run to—none that their shaken hearts could bear, anyway—but somehow until this moment Ben hadn’t let himself believe she meant to stay. When he woke to the jostle of the ship leaving hyperspace he had been preparing himself on some level to find her gone, and couldn’t shake the fear until he saw her again.

 _She is not here for you,_ he reminds himself. _The Force led her here._

She trusts in the Force, even if she does not trust him: that must be enough. Ben’s hand hovers beside hers on the console, waiting. Her eyes are clear when she looks up at him; she is unsure, maybe, but she is not afraid.

Her courage is infectious. Her faith anchors him.

“Shall we, then?” she asks.

As one body, guided by one mind, together they chart the course across the stars; the first leg of the journey that will take them to the world from their dreams.

 

**

 

It was only when they were safely aboard the shuttle that Ben realised he was gripping Rey’s hand tight enough to bruise it.

She grasped him back just as fiercely, her eyes stark and her face white. She looked dazed, holding onto him even when the gangway had raised behind them and so Ben simply tugged her forward to get them airborne and away. It was challenging one-handed, but there was something strangely grounding about her touch—as if she were a tether, the one thing keeping him from pinwheeling free into space after what had happened.

Only when they were free of the ship and into the blue did Ben release the breath he had been holding, a little of the tension leaving him, but he didn’t turn towards her just yet. Everything felt so brittle, so impossibly delicate, and if he so much as moved he feared it all might shatter.

“Ben?”

Her voice was whisper-thin. Her hand squeezed his. Ben turned his head to find Rey gazing up at him, looking lost.

 _You can’t be lost,_ he wanted to protest. _I am the one who is lost. I’m following you. You’re supposed to know the way—_

“Wh—” she faltered. “Where are we going?”

That she was so clearly in shock was the one thing keeping Ben from freezing up himself. “I…I don’t know. I’ve set us along the Triellus Run. We can—we can figure out specifics later.”

Rey nodded, and then seemed to realise she was still holding onto him. She released him hastily, crossing her arms over her chest and rubbing at her biceps: it was cold on the shuttle, and her skin was clammy with sweat.

Sweat and blood. She was bleeding.

“Your arm,” Ben said, one hand lurching upwards before his brain caught up and stopped it. Rey blinked dazedly at him.

“Huh?”

“You—you’re hurt.”

“Oh,” she glanced down—at the wrong arm—and shrugged. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not—Rey, you’re bleeding.”

“S’just a scratch,” she mumbled, only now she was staring down at it, rapt like she had never seen her own blood before. “Can’t even feel it.”

“All the same.” Ben dug the medkit from beneath the dashboard and moved towards her. Rey flinched away when he went to take her arm, a wild animal unused to gentle touch and he the brute unused to wielding it.

“I can do it,” she said stiffly, one hand extended to take the kit while the other she positioned slightly behind her. Her eyes were wary: whatever fragile trust had been forged between them was no more, broken by what Snoke had done to her. She was once more on her guard and it shouldn’t surprise him in the least but it _did:_ it hit him like a blow to see the caution in her eyes again.

 _You put her in chains again,_ he reminded himself. _What did you think would happen?_

Truthfully, Ben hadn’t thought much further ahead than that moment, and the inevitable choice he had to make, because Rey had forced his hand by coming here and there was no way they would all make it out of this alive but it was hard to see beyond the immediate truth that she was _there._ She had come to him; she had _chosen_ him, and somehow everything would be alright.

What happened next didn’t matter: things would unfold as the Force willed, because Rey had come and she would be beside him for it all.

He couldn’t abandon that hope now.

 _Fix this,_ Ben ordered himself. _She is still here. She hasn’t left you. Fix this._

“I can help,” he offered, “if you let me.”

Rey regarded him steadily, then leaned over and took the medkit from his outstretched hand. “I’ll manage,” she said, but her voice wasn’t quite so cool as it had been, and Ben counted it as a small victory as she headed into the back of the shuttle to tend her wounds in private.

Her departure seemed to release some valve inside him: all at once Ben could feel the multitude of aches and pains in his own body, a survivor’s reward for winning the fight for his life. His hands shook: the adrenaline was slowly wearing off to leave behind a bone-deep exhaustion. Left alone in the cockpit, the reek of burnt cloth thick in his nose and a faint, shrill ringing in his ears, he staggered into the pilot’s seat and dropped his head into his hands.

His mind still hadn’t processed everything that had happened. Snoke was dead. He, Kylo Ren, was a fugitive, a regicide, having turned his back—in spectacular fashion—on what he had believed to be his destiny.

Rey was with him.

It was a lot to take in.

Ben didn’t know where to start.

**


End file.
